adj.
'fitting, excellent'
(Modern English sete)Two sources (and senses) have been suggested for the adj. used to describe the quality of broths in Gaw 889: (1) an unrecorded OE simplex *(ge)sǣte (?fitting, excellent, good, suitable, (of food) wholesome') (comparing the attested andsǣte ‘hateful, repugnant’ etc., see DOE) (see OED, Kullnick 1902: 10 and glosses in TGD and GDS); this OE -sǣte represents a PGmc adjectival *sēt- (cp. Go anda-sēts ‘detestable’, MDu ont-set ‘odious, hateful’, OIcel sætt (neut.) ‘what one can sit under, endurable’, MHG ant-setze ‘brave’), derived on the pret. pl. grade of the PGmc str. vb. *setjan-. (2) Less plausibly, MED derives ME sete partly from ON, comparing OIcel sœtr ‘sweet (literal and figurative)’(cp. OE swēte, OFris swēte, OS swōti, OHG suozi) < PGmc *swōt-, because it seems nearer in sense to Gaw 889 than the base-meanings of OE -sǣte, and perhaps to help account for the arrival of a simplex adj. in ME. However ‘attractive, tasty’ is a gloss from context in all the occurrences listed by MED under its sense (a), ‘Of food, drink, etc.: wholesome, fit for consumption; good, attractive, tasty’, and ‘fitting, suitable, beneficial’ would work just as well in every case. A derivation from ON sœtr is formally plausible (ON loss of /w/ before /ø:/ is an early change); but rhyme evidence seems to indicate the availability in ME of both close /e:/ and open /ɛ:/, which sits better with derivation from PGmc /e:/1 (OE WS. /æ:/, Angl. /e:/) than from the i-mutation product of PGmc /o:/ (which ought to give the close sound only).
PGmc Ancestor
*sēt- or *swot-
Proposed ON Etymon (OIcel representative)
sœtr 'sweet'
(ONP sǿtr (adj.))
Other Scandinavian Reflexes
Far søtr, Icel sætur, Norw søt, ODan søt, Dan sød, OSw söter, Sw söt
OE Cognate
*(ge)sǣte, cp. andsǣte ‘hateful, repugnant’
Phonological and morphological markers
[ON loss of */w/ before rounded vowel] (may not be applicable)
Summary category
CCC3
(CCC1)
MED records a handful of 14c. and 15c. instances, with no particular dial bias.
Occurrences in the Gersum Corpus
Gaw 889